Are male politicians asked for recipes when they run for office? Why aren't they? Obviously, recipes are much more important than sports. (((rolls eyes for emphasis)))

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Meanwhile, I am looking at the photo at the left and wondering why I wasn't born with dainty, high-class girl-hands instead of hulking hands that look like they belong to a peasant. (Wait, I think I know the answer to that one.) Now you see why they forced the awful violin on me. Argh.

Consider this an open thread! Looking for interesting reading material, and too lazy to go looking for it. Contributions please; spam permitted. Keep it civil, and do not use this as an excuse to pick a fight over my moderation policy.

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Fortunately, you have few professional sports teams in your area, but yes. A candidate should know at least the local and regional sports teams and stars and where they play. Massachusetts takes its sports seriously and the teams have had championships to prove it (now). Even if Coakley thought Schilling was a forward for the Bruins, calling him a Yankees fan when that is the serious baseball rivalry in New England was major cluelessness.

The thing is that knowing something about sports teams and players is less a masculine signifier and more an indicator of caring about the local life. You should still challenge the male candidates to show you the recipes, though.

(Well, that's one reason I don't run for public office. Also the remembering names thing, the flesh-pressing, the smile muscles frozen in rictus, and platforms. Ow. Those shoes hurt.)

I love hands. I don't have a clue as to how to read palms, but I figured out a long time ago that any old shit will do--as long as I steer clear of predictions! But the thing is if I read palms then I get to hold hands, and there really are all these lines and things to see. And when you hold hands you can look in someone's eyes. I guess that means you ought not to hold hands with a fool like me unless you trust. But it's precisely that trepidation about trust that's good and human. I like your hands, I'm sure if I were reading your palm I'd think of lots of good things to tell you. We all are really beautiful in our own way.

This 2004 piece in LBR Who Removed Aristide is the best short intorduction to Haiti's history I've read online.

I suspect it would be better to admit not following sports than to unsuccessfully try to BS your way through the answer.

The parts that bothered me were her supporting the arrest and prosecution of a father who found his son being groped by a janitor in a bathroom, and punched the janitor--"We discourage self-help". She was also involved in the "satanic abusive daycare" debacles.

If there's one thing I learned back in 2004, it's this:Candidate who wants to cut give massive tax breaks to the rich while taking away your overtime pay but wears a cowboy hat and talks folksy=man of the people.Candidate who supports unions and wants to narrow the gap between the rich and the rest of us but windsurfs and doesn't seem genuine when he says he likes Nascar=elitist.

And, one thing that's been made clear by Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi and others is that a female candidate has to show that she's not too, y'know, female, usually by showing a particular desire to kill people and a marked lack of compassion...so, it's not surprising that liking sports would help, as well.

The case "Sevesteen" is referring to is the Gerald Amirault case which occurred in the early eighties along with a number of other ones, including the Bee Baran case which the Teabaggers in Massachusetts didn't seem very concerned with. His case was a very sad one. There were some other ones that occurred in Massachusetts along with the Fells Acres case, where Amirault was convicted along with his mother and his sister. There was also the Souza Case. It was the Amirault case, however, that the Brown camp used to tar Coakley with. The Baran case is a very tragic one, though. I wish Arthur Miller were around to write about those times.

For anyone who likes to do a lot of reading here are some links:

(Note: I am not very tech savvy or familiar w/ Blogger. I can't get those addresses to link up to their sites - my apologies - anyone who is truly interested can copy and paste)

Here is a chronology from the Bernard Baran Justice Committee that provides a chronology for all those cases - the Amiraults, the Souza's, and Baran.

http://www.freebaran.org/chron.php

I became interested in Baran through Karen Franklin who is a forensic psychologist who is very critical of the APA DSM revision process. The Coakley/Brown election piqued my interest in what I had read previously. As much as the Brown people railed against injustice, it is difficult for me to see them as civil libertarians.

I'm extremely disappointed in my former home state. I checked out the town by town results and you see the pockets of intelligence in Boston/North Shore, Worcestor, Springfield, all of Western Mass. and the Lower Cape to Provincetown. My hometown, Sandwich, overwhelmingly voted for Brown.

Normally I try to keep politics off my FB page, b/c it always sparks a firestorm, but I was so annoyed w/ my high school classmates' Pro Brown statuses and profile pictures that I had to voice my disappointment on my status.